AMERICANS WOULD AGREE the US has never seen a politician quite like Donald Trump. Constant falsehoods, attacks on newspapers, over-the-top insults directed at individual reporters—these are things many in the US media haven’t had to deal with before. To Canadians, though, this type of media manipulation is all too familiar. For several years, former Toronto Mayor Rob Ford treated journalists in much the same way.

The similarities between how these two politicians have approached the media is uncanny, says Daniel Dale, a Toronto Star journalist who covered Ford when he was in office and is now writing about Trump from Washington.